This Louisiana INBRE proposal builds on the success of our current program and seeks to enhance the biomedical research capacity of our primarily undergraduate institutional (PUI) partners through renewed and expanded collaboration with the bio-medical research community within the State. We will support and continue to develop the infrastructural and intellectual network between all PUIs and all of the biomedical research intensive institutions in the state. Five of the PUIs have been chosen as primary PUI institutions for research awards, based on their missions'which fit with the three thematic areas of the INBRE. These themes (Computational and Structural Biology, Molecular Mechanisms of Disease, Therapeutics and Preventive Medicine) reflect the strengths of the research campuses and the strategic plans and visions of our PUI partner campuses and faculty. Faculty of these 5 PUIs competes for pilot and full research projects within the INBRE. Undergraduates, graduate students and faculty from all 4-year PUIs compete and participate in funded research programs during the summer at the research intensive universities. To facilitate our goals we have developed two cores (Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and Computational Biology, and Molecular and Cell Biology) to provide research support, training and access to research infrastructure. Overlaying all of these activities will be the regular metric driven assessment of our progress in developing individual investigators, enhancement of PUI biomedical research capacity, outreach activities, and the effective usage of cores. We have made significant progress, changes and improvements in our approach. Together with the commitment of faculty, the Universities within the State, and the Louisiana Board of Regents match of $1.2 million will clearly meet our goals and that of the national INBRE program.